Daniel J. Donovan

When thinking back to my arrival on campus in 1973, I’m amazed at the progression of computer instruction over the course of my teaching career at the Mount. Back then the college had one IBM 1130 computer in its inventory. It featured a black and white monitor and typewriter on an elaborate command console that appeared to belong on a spaceship. Featuring 8 kilobytes of memory, computer operations were a skilled task and often the job entry point for many of our Computer Science graduates. Amazingly, this one machine, running three shifts, handled all the instructional and administrative needs of the college for many years. Students would write programming commands on coding sheets in the classroom and then go to the basement to key their code onto paper cards for input to the computer.

Over the past 50 years, we all know the transitions from main frame computers to the PC, then the Internet, and now mobile computing. Change is increasing at an increasing rate and we’re all scrambling to keep up.